


a life to give

by the_garbage_will_do



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mutual Pining, Secret Identity, Suicidal Ideation, Time Travel, Tros fix-it, Violence, brief mentions of the Rey-Kylo dyad, canon-typical psychological abuse from Snoke and Palpatine, past canon-typical relationship abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28490625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: Stranded on Exegol, Armitage takes a deal he doesn’t understand and falls to lightning he shouldn’t survive. He wakes up ten years earlier with a whole galaxy to save.For that, he needs Ben Solo— still an innocent Padawan, still painfully kind— at his side.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 14
Kudos: 100





	a life to give

_ Peace is a lie. There is only Passion. _ _  
_ _ Through Passion I gain Strength. _ _  
_ _ Through Strength I gain Power. _ _  
_ _ Through Power I gain Victory. _ _  
_ _ Through Victory my chains are Broken. _ _  
_ _ The Force shall free me. _

_ \- The Sith creed _

Armitage died at five years old.

He’d lived a full life in those first years, nourished equally on Imperial propaganda and the epics of Arkanisian martyrs. Then he was marched underground on Jakku, down the frigid black halls of the Emperor’s Observatory. At five years old he was given his first command, and on command he’d gone to war, his childhood and innocence and hopes buried in the sand.

He’d died on Jakku, cast forever as a little boy of stone.

.

At age thirty-five, Armitage takes a bolt to the chest and keeps breathing. His armor serves its purpose and preserves his life, and he’s only slightly peeved that Pryde didn’t grant him peace by going for the head. Armitage intends to steal an escape pod and abscond, to ship himself to the Resistance and declare himself their new general and perhaps die in their service—

The  _ Steadfast _ explodes. It crash-lands on Exegol before Armitage can make a move, and the floor tilts out from beneath him, dropping him against a wall. He awakes an eternity later, saved once more by his armor, buried in the wreckage and still alive.

If he hadn’t died and turned to stone thirty years ago, he might cry.

Unsheathing his monomolecular blade, he frees himself from the wreckage. His leg bleeds freely again, but he’s stranded in the dark, with no hope of proper medical attention. 

Still he hauls himself from the crash site, dragging his leg behind him and squinting through the darkness. In the rare flashes of lightning he finds no one and nothing but a black, frigid desert.

“Ren,” he mutters. Comms are down, rendered useless by the lightning. Ren is his only hope now. Guided by some well-timed vision, Ren can come for him still, can scoop him out of the sand in that damn over-designed  _ Silencer, _ can claim the privilege of killing Armitage himself.

He’d like to believe Ren would come for him, if he could.

A few miles off, blue light explodes from the  _ ground _ . Ordinarily, upon seeing an unexplained flash of blue, Armitage would suspect an electrical malfunction and run, but now he stumbles towards it. The wind and the pain force him to his knees, but still he crawls across the vast expanse, half-delirious and gasping for each breath. Though it would be easier to collapse, his death is the greatest gift he has left to offer. He will not grant it to mere sand.

The light calls.

At last he reaches the place where the light flashed. There’s a starving black abyss.

“Ren?” calls Armitage.

Perhaps it’s a trick of the lightning above, the blue spark flickering down in the darkness.

With bloodied hands, he reaches forth and touches the chasm’s edge. The stone crumbles away as if waiting for him, baring a pathway downwards, and he forces himself to his feet.

For a second time, he marches underground.

Something calls him down. If he’d seen less of the galaxy he’d blame his own lack of ingenuity, his inability to find an escape route aboveground. As it is, he’s seen Ren, he’s seen Ren and  _ Rey, _ and so he suspects that another force orchestrates his descent. 

_ Something _ pulls him down towards the planet core. Simultaneously, it rudely pulls up old images, unearthing thoughts better left buried. A rare smile of his father’s. A daydream long-quashed of simply running to irrelevance, to a forgotten backwater planet where he might hang out his shingle as a humble mechanic. A stolen smile of Ren’s, so young and free it might’ve been Ben Solo’s, in those easy golden days when Armitage insisted they had no “exclusive bond” between them and never imagined  _ Ren _ would be the one to leave.

There’s moisture prickling on his cheeks. Armitage rubs it away, recognizing it as tears a moment later.

Before him, a glimmer of blue.

“Ben!”

He begins to run, wound forgotten, drawn inexplicably towards the light. As he draws near, it coalesces into a delicate blue butterfly flitting through the dark. He tries to cup it in his hands.

It vanishes at his touch, disintegrating like a firecracker into fast-dying sparks.

Armitage drops to his knees.

Ren is dead. He doesn’t know  _ how _ he knows this, but it’s true nonetheless. Ren has died somewhere on Exegol, has gone down like a martyr for some magnificent cause, and it couldn’t be a more exquisite death if a bard had composed it. Armitage shakes, weeping, shuddering apart under grief and envy.

“Your passion shines strong.”

His head jerks upwards. A voice— a girl’s golden voice, multi-layered— glows in the shadow.

“Your love for him.”

“I didn’t—” 

Heartache stops the lie on his tongue.

“It’s twisted,” she muses, “but there is light at the core.”

“Who are you?”

“I am the light that allows this place of shadow.”

It’s about as coherent as Ren ever got.

“How far can your love take you? Would you pay your greatest price, for him?”

His eyes widen in understanding. “I would.”

He is stranded in a desert without comms. He has been dead thirty years.

“To bring him back,” he adds, hoarse. “If you can.”

“If  _ you _ can,” she lightly corrects. “Would you give your life to save Ben Solo?”

“Please.”

He is only a statue, only fit to be a martyr in a poem. He has nothing to give but death.

“If you embrace your power, it will be.”

Lightning strikes, blue blazing all around. At age thirty-five, he falls into the long-awaited peace of sleep.

.

He wakes up, alive and twenty-four years old.

.

Armitage wakes up ten years before Starkiller fired. The galaxy believes itself at peace. The First Order is a mere fledgling militia, a toothless threat that no one but Leia Organa notices. There’s no Force-using mage at its head. It’s still run by another brand of monster— Brendol Hux.

Brendol is away from headquarters, and Armitage opts not to confront him just yet. He simply fakes his own death in one of the First Order’s early, disastrous weapons tests and absconds within a day, hidden in the cargo bay of a supply ship bound for the Outer Rim. His father will hardly mourn him.

Effortlessly, Armitage leaves the First Order, ridding himself of one chain. Thus he plunges into the real war, for the Force was clear: Ben Solo will live only if Armitage can save him. In the cargo bay’s chill, Armitage discerns a greater goal than a single man. By saving Ben Solo, he can save the galaxy.

Both face the same two threats: Snoke and Palpatine. They must be destroyed now, before their reign of terror. Unfortunately, if Armitage were selecting ideal agents to destroy two near-omnipotent Force-users, he’d hardly put himself on the list. 

(It doesn’t help that he just fled the one military he had hope of controlling.)

He has one advantage. Snoke specializes in telepathy. He latches onto the minds of powerful Force-sensitives, reconditioning them from across the galaxy and turning their own strength against them. It’s how Kylo Ren rose— or fell, depending on one’s perspective. By contrast, Armitage scarcely has more midichlorians than a droid. In their early days, Ren informed him loudly and often of his uselessness in the Force, the fact that he was practically invisible at a distance. His strong will— stubbornness, Ren called it, as if he was in any position to judge— shields him from face-to-face mental attacks. The depths of his mind are near-impossible to penetrate.

(It’s the only reason he survived his turn as spy.)

Yet Armitage is more isolated now than as a saboteur, and his position’s just as precarious. If he alerts anyone to his mission, if he dares run to Leia Organa and declare himself a time-traveler and openly reveal all he knows, he risks losing immediately. She must shine like a beacon in the Force, and so Snoke might just be listening in her head. Armitage can list twenty ways such eavesdropping would lead to his own immediate death. When he considers that the Emperor might have an additional army of non-magical spies, ex-Imperials gathering intelligence throughout the galaxy, he gives up on winning honest allies.

Ben Solo will live if he can make it so. Armitage can rely only on himself.

He can’t recruit allies openly. He must collect them with guile instead, because he can’t act without information. The Sith armada and its associated tech couldn’t arise on Exegol, not with the absurd levels of lightning and atmospheric interference, so Palpatine must be repairing his body and cultivating his forces on some other world. Hux needs to know  _ where. _

And though he ponders the matter through the entire trip from the Unknown Regions, trying desperately to find an alternative, he knows only one person who can plausibly answer that question.

.

Armitage designs a new life for himself.

It’s a childhood dream come true, but he approaches the task logically, somberly. Huddled on a grimy passenger freighter from the Outer Rim, he forges a New Republic chain code and with it, an identity. For his homeworld he picks not Arkanis but another Regency World nearby, with its own share of redheads, and he keeps his birth year but edits the month and day. The name “Armitage Hux” won’t do any longer, and he chooses a first name to memorialize the now non-existent  _ Finalizer, _ the only home he’s ever liked. He justifies the surname as a tactical choice, an obvious alias to deter questions into his background. It’s the galactically recognized brand of hurt, fatherless children.

He names himself “Lizer Solo.”

He has fewer choices regarding his profession. He needs an easy job, inconspicuous yet useful. He has no choice at all as to where he’ll live. External facts have dictated which planet he must inhabit. He knows from Ren— from whispered confessions in the dead of night— which provincial town he must now make his own.

Armitage designs a new life, knowing full well that he’s orchestrating his death. The Force was clear. He will give his life to save Ben Solo. Whether he succeeds or not, he will die trying. 

It’s some comfort, that no one will mourn him.

.

Vitta.

It’s an obscure planet, safely off the major hyperspace lanes, its vast green hills spotted with farms and sleepy towns. Vitta’s sparsely populated, but even the smallest economy needs someone to fix what’s broken. With the last of his funds, Armitage purchases space for a shop with private rooms in the back, and he scrounges up supplies from the town’s junk heaps. 

He announces himself as Lizer Solo, general-purpose mechanic.

He has no customers at first. There are two other repair shops in town, and while he’s better they’ve had years to establish themselves. To accomplish his goals, Armitage must now craft an airtight, years-long battle plan. He must build up his reputation and grow his clientele. He must ultimately get hired by a complex outside town, a secretive academy hidden on this irrelevant planet, impenetrable to outsiders. If he ever breaks in, he’ll have to smile and network until he at last manages a meeting with his true target, a meeting he’ll rehearse a thousand times beforehand…

The bell on his front door rings, announcing his first customer. Armitage steps out of his private rooms into the shop, contorting his face into the most welcoming grin he can offer to—

Ben Solo.

Against his will, Armitage’s grin falters, slipping into something far softer.

Ben Solo stands on his threshold, ruddy-cheeked and slightly out of breath. He’s dressed in grey Jedi robes. His hair’s cut shorter, ears poking out, black curls shining in the sunlight, and his face is sun-kissed and golden and impossibly  _ young, _ with a healthful glow Armitage has never seen.

He meant to spin a thousand plots and rehearse this first meeting a thousand times. One look at Ben Solo, and all his schemes wisp away.

“Sorry.”

On instinct Armitage demands, “Why, what did you do?”

“...Nothing.”

Armitage startles himself by  _ laughing. _ “Then there’s no apology needed.”

Ben blinks back at him, utterly guileless. “No, I guess not.”

“Forgive my rudeness, you’re my first,” Armitage blurts, so light and breathless he barely recognizes his own voice. “What can I help you with?”

“I know you’re new, but that’s why I hoped you could help me.”

“Anything you need.”

From his pockets Ben pulls a tapered transparisteel tube, filled with viscous blue liquid and capped with metal. After a moment’s hesitation he crosses the shop to place it on Armitage’s worktable.

“What is this supposed to be?”

“A ferrofluid nightlight.” When Armitage frowns in confusion, he elaborates: “There’s a heat lamp at the bottom. The whole thing should have red bubbles and glow.”

Armitage gapes. “So it’s...decorative?”

“Yeah.”

Kylo Ren, with his bare quarters and his passion for wearing black on black, once owned a frivolous New Republic lamp in neon-blue. The idea nearly makes Armitage  _ giggle. _

“And I don’t like the dark,” Ben adds offhand.

The metal part has a latch. Armitage opens it and finds an electronic control panel in disarray, its wires criss-crossed and charred.

“What happened here?”

“It just stopped working, I don’t know why.”

Armitage steals a glance. Ren tried to lie so often and failed, and Ben is even more of an open book. He’s being honest.

“But then I might’ve tried to hot-wire it,” Ben winces, “and that went...about as well as usual.”

“If hot-wiring fails, why do you keep trying?”

“Family tradition?”

Armitage snorts.

“I’ve taken it to the other two repair shops in town, and they say it’s unsalvageable.”

“Liars,” scoffs Armitage. “Give me one second.”

Unexpectedly, Armitage goes through a full spool of bonding tape, but though he’s never seen a ferrofluid nightlight in his life, he identifies enough familiar wiring patterns to fix it. Immediately the lamp powers on, and the blue liquid glows. Then a red bubble blossoms at the base of the lamp, heated by the bulb. It floats up, cools and wafts down again.

“It works,” Ben whispers in awe.

“Of course it works, it’s just like—”

Like the thermal oscillator that kept Starkiller Base from shattering, right up until Poe Dameron blew said oscillator to pieces.

“Like any other lamp,” he finishes. “Just with some extra baggage attached.”

He feels an odd kinship with the lamp as Ben picks it back up, now happily bubbling away.

“How much do I owe you?”

“...Nothing. Call it a first customer’s discount.”

“Are you sure?” His eyes widen like he can’t comprehend such kindness.

“Of course, just tell your friends about this place.”

Ben intones, “What friends?”

Armitage forgets whatever cheery response he had prepared and stares at Ben. He only knows the outline of how Ben Solo became Kylo Ren, but he knows Snoke is in Ben’s head already, was always whispering in Ben’s head, insisting he had nothing and no one. Armitage searches Ben’s face for that underlying darkness but only sees a fragile, self-deprecating smirk.

“Just come back here next time you need something. That’ll be payment enough.”

Ben throws him a grateful smile. One smile, and Armitage feels his armor crack.

.

The bell rings, again announcing Ben Solo’s entrance. 

Occupied by another client, Armitage braces for a tantrum, at least a grand stomp of the foot. Yet Ben withdraws peacefully to a far corner of the store to fiddle with a half-assembled vaporator, lifting the parts delicately, endeavoring to avoid any further damage. Armitage rapidly finishes his current task and returns to Ben.

“You came back.”

“I have another challenge, if you’re up for it.”

“Always.” Ben passes him a metal box. Armitage pops the lid open and finds a wheel inside, with empty circles at the end of each spoke. He stares at it for a moment, perplexed. “Is this a centrifuge?”

“Yeah, I make my own ink sometimes. I’m a calligrapher.”

“...I would honestly have never guessed.”

“But,” Ben murmurs somberly, “I’m not popular with my...peers. One of them stole all my ink without knowing how the locks work, and they jammed the wheel in the process.”

Reaching in with a wrench, Armitage fixes the mechanism too quickly. “I assume you’ll wreak bloody vengeance on the culprit.”

Ben takes the box with a frown. “I...I could figure out who did it, but now that it’s fixed, I’ll let it go.”

It’s so unlike Ren, Armitage gapes for a moment. He can only manage a half-fitting truism: “Forgiveness is a virtue.”

Nodding, Ben pulls out a coin purse, small but bulging with credits, and begins to speak.

Armitage beats him to it: “What’s your name?”

“Ben Solo. How about you?”

“Lizer Solo.”

Ben chuckles at the last name. “I guess there’s a story behind that?”

“Quite so.”

Ren would now poke around his conversation partner’s head. Ben keeps his mental tendrils entirely to himself.

“I’m still new here,” Armitage adds. “So...tell me something interesting about Vitta.”

He pauses. “You’ve already heard about the school, haven’t you?”

Armitage thought the location of the Jedi Academy a secret, obtained with difficulty by the Order. But perhaps it’s common knowledge on this innocent backwater.

“What school?” he prods.

“Oh.” Ben’s eyes widen. “Luke Skywalker runs a school for new Jedi.”

“And I assume you’re the best pupil.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re wearing Jedi robes.”

“Sure, but why would you think I’m any good at it?”

“Apparently, you do calligraphy,” says Armitage. “That’s particularly monkish as hobbies go.”

“Everyone’s the best in their own way,” he offers. It’s far too generous a statement, yet he somehow  _ means _ it. “All I can do is try. How much do I—”

“Your conversation’s payment enough.”

Clearly skeptical, Ben puts his wallet away. “Please tell me you’re not this sweet to all your customers.”

“I’ve never been accused of ‘sweetness’ in my life,” Armitage deadpans. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m worried you’ll starve at this rate.”

“Don’t. In my bedroom, I have enough bread powder to feed an army.” It’s true— when he left the Order, he took more than a few souvenirs.

_ “Bread powder?!” _

“It’s nutritious! Don’t worry about me, I can take care of myself.”

“If you say so,” Ben says, now deeply amused. “See you around.”

Before he leaves, he flashes Armitage a blinding grin.

.

Those smiles will be the death of him.

There’s a war brewing, an impending showdown with Snoke and Palpatine, and Armitage meant to approach it with all the detachment and cunning this situation demands. With Ben Solo, he can achieve neither.

There’s no detachment, no chance of objectivity. He never was fully objective about Ren. He faked distance when Ren too stayed aloof, untouchable behind all his masks; he pretended their relationship was merely physical. Still he had spied rare glimmers of sincerity in Ren, smiles and grief flickering across his face. Those glimpses of an honest  _ man _ called to Armitage, stirring a heart he didn’t know he still had, like magma oscillating secretly beneath a deep crust of stone.

Ben Solo is entirely honest, hurt and curiosity and delight all worn on his sleeve. In light of Ben Solo, detachment is out of the question. Armitage had meant to be devious, weaving a thousand shadowy plots; he’d meant to destroy Snoke and Palpatine by  _ manipulating Ben.  _ In light of Ben’s unsuspecting innocence, Armitage cannot summon even the slightest cunning.

.

“Since you won’t take my money, I brought you something edible.”

“Bread powder is perfectly edible, thank you.”

Armitage rolls his eyes but takes Ben’s offering regardless. He tugs open the neatly tied napkin and finds a local fruit, plump and red.

“To what do I owe the honor?”

Ben opens his other hand to reveal a training remote in the middle of his excessively large palm. Armitage recalls this device from Ren’s training; presumably it was once a small metal sphere. This one has been squashed almost beyond recognition.

“Dare I ask?” 

“I lost control,” Ben says, staring down at the remote with widened eyes, voice drenched with regret. “I didn’t mean to, I just…”

He lifts his gaze to meet Armitage’s, eyes dark and pleading.

Gently, careful to inflict no further hurt, Armitage takes the remote in his own hands. It requires finer tinkering than any of Ben’s previous projects, and he applies the most delicate tools in his store.

“Ben Solo,” he murmurs while working. “You’re not related to Luke Skywalker, are you?”

“...Yeah.”

“Han Solo and Leia Organa’s son?”

A nod.

“That must be difficult.”

He knows more about Ben than he ought to, and he meant only to reduce the information asymmetry, to let Ben reveal some basic facts about himself so Armitage can mention them without fear. He meant that last comment on “difficulty” as an empty platitude. Still, Ben gawps at him.

“What?”

“That’s not the usual response.”

“What’s the usual response?”

“How lucky I am,” Ben deadpans, “to come from such a perfect family.”

Armitage snorts. “No family’s perfect. High expectations, fabulous legacies...they only make things harder.” 

Brendol Hux flashes through his head, dressed in a spotless Imperial uniform.

“Got it in one,” sighs Ben.

Squinting at the remote, keenly aware of Ben’s gaze heavy on his hands, Armitage hooks the final wire into place and then straightens up. “I can’t fix this all myself.” When Ben tilts his head in surprise, he explains, “I’ve redone the innards, but the outside shell is...malformed. Badly. I’d need a full-blown kiln to recast it, and I don’t have one on hand.”

“Ah,” he replies in quiet resignation.

“Why not opt for a new one? Shouldn’t a Jedi school have extras?”

Ben fidgets. “I haven’t told my un— Master Luke that I broke another remote. I’ve got the entire lecture memorized, don’t need a repeat.”

His chuckle’s laced with shame.

“And it’s all right that you can’t fix it,” he adds, words strung too high. “I know I’m...taking up too much of your time, you have better things to do than—”

“Than you? Hardly.” He realizes the innuendo as he utters it, but Ben thankfully doesn’t seem to notice. “I spend most of my days fixing the same three farming tools. If I’m lucky, I get to update the programming. More often, I just have to turn it off, wait five minutes, and turn it on again. You— that is, your nightlights and your ink makers and combat remotes are an absolute blessing. Who’d tell you otherwise?”

He tacks on that last sentence as a rhetorical question, yet Ben flinches.

(Snoke. That’s who.)

“There’s another way to fix this,” Armitage offers. “I assume, Mr. Jedi, that you’re good at the Force.”

The botched idiom makes Ben smile again. “That’s not quite how the Force works—”

“Maybe you can pull the shell back into shape.”

He freezes. “I can’t.”

Ren could have. Though he preferred grand shows of destruction, he could be delicate when he wanted, and Armitage wonders whether Ben is truly less capable or simply less secure.

“I won’t think less of you if it doesn’t work,” he says cautiously, snapping the shell shut. “Why not try?”

Wracked by obvious self-doubt, Ben takes the remote and closes his eyes, cradling it in his hands. The dented shell bends outward, its metal rippling in waves before flattening out, stretched back into a sphere. When he taps the on-button the remote powers up and rises a foot into the air, its lights blinking merrily.

Ben stares at it, stunned.

“I knew you’d get it,” Armitage remarks matter-of-factly. As Ben continues staring, he takes a large bite of his new fruit, finding it sweet and tangy. A stream of white juice dribbles down his chin.

Now Ben stares at  _ him.  _ Armitage can’t guess why, between them  _ Ren _ was never the stickler for neatness, but he rubs away the stray juice with the back of his hand.

“Better than bread powder?” Ben says upon recovering his senses. Armitage had  _ heard _ cockiness in Ren’s voice, but that doesn’t compare to seeing Ben’s expression right now— impudently, magnificently smug.

“I’ll never tell,” he replies, as cheekily as he can.

.

Armitage wanted to avoid Snoke’s notice a few months longer. Unsurprisingly, that hope got crushed.

He sits upright in his bedroom, unable to sleep. His mattress is softer and larger than he’s used to, as spacious as the bed he once shared with Ren, and he feels the emptiness keenly.

He sits in the darkness and thinks of a voice like light in a world of shadow. Of a butterfly he chased whole-heartedly on Exegol, though his effort was worthless. That butterfly had shattered at his touch.

He’d simultaneously shattered under his own regret, and he’d fallen to his knees under the weight of all he would’ve done for Ren if he’d had a second chance. In his delirium on Exegol, he’d seen so clearly that Ren needed— not pity. Just compassion, and some honesty to go with it.

He has the chance to fix it all now. It surprises him how much he wants to.

Rae Sloane had offered Armitage compassion, once. Perhaps he was just a tool in her schemes, but he hadn’t cared. The gravity of the Empire’s legacy had compressed him to solid rock under Jakku, and if there is any vein of goodness still running through him, it is because of her. He wonders who now shows Ben Solo even a shadow of kindness.

The answer’s easy: Snoke.

Snoke is in Ben’s head, whispering poison disguised as nurturing advice, whispering that Armitage doesn’t want to see him anymore. Given his experience with the Order’s reconditioning program and with Ren and Snoke themselves, Armitage is familiar with the principles of this manipulation. Snoke hasn’t yet revealed himself to Ben or the galaxy in all his violent horror; he only whispers petty lies to isolate a boy from peers and family around him. It’s the oldest tactic in the book. Divide and conquer.

Snoke’s scheming, the rise of the Order, Palpatine’s second empire— they all hinge on Ben’s despair.

_How far can your love take you?_ asked the voice of light. Armitage mistook that as philosophical gibberish before, but now he sees a painfully literal interpretation. The best way to defeat Snoke is to give Ben another source of love, insistent and unwavering. His family could take on the role, or his Force-given soulmate, Rey. But the Organa-Solos failed last time, and if Armitage brings Rey into this then he’ll just make another overpowered child vulnerable to Palpatine. 

Love can prevent this war before it starts. 

Regrettably, the task falls to Armitage.

He bursts out laughing at the very idea of  _ him _ saving the galaxy through  _ love.  _ He doesn’t know if it’s possible. His heart calcified when he was five years old. He remains a little stone boy, numb and apathetic and emotionally dead.

(Yet his cheeks are wet with tears, and for once he doesn’t slap them away.)

.

Armitage awakens before dawn. For the first time, he’s free from schedules, with a real choice in how to fill his days.

He chooses a morning walk. The air is cool and bracing, and the exertion pinches red into his cheeks. He selects paths largely at random, nodding politely at other townspeople, never straying too close to the grey domes where Luke Skywalker reigns.

A half-hour later, he spies a familiar bird’s nest of black hair. Ben sits cross-legged on the side of his path, eyes closed, face blank. Armitage might believe him supremely content if he hadn’t known Ren, who hated meditation with the passion of a burning sun.

He halts. “Bored?”

Ben’s perfect posture crumbles to a slouch, and he opens his eyes. “That obvious?”

“If meditation is just a school assignment, I’d sneak out a nice holonovel.”

“It’s not,” he sighs. “It’s a...personal assignment.”

“A punishment?”

“Technically, no.” He  _ wriggles,  _ stretching his spine and neck.

“Technically?”

“...I have bad dreams.”

“Flashbacks? Prophetic nightmares?” prompts Armitage. “Or are they just...strange?”

“Just strange.”

“Do tell.” Armitage crouches down beside him.

“I dreamed I was locked in a bacta tank.” When Armitage gives an involuntary shiver, he lifts his eyebrows. “Scared already?”

“Hardly!”

“So I was in a bacta tank, but it was the worst bacta tank of all time. Huge, but I was still cramped. And the top was pointed like a cone, and the liquid was dirty and...green.”

“Charming.”

Armitage frowns, trying to determine what this dream could possibly portend. Ren had landed in a bacta tank frequently, it’s true, but the Order’s tanks were all pristine cylinders filled with blue…

“And there were other tanks, but it was  _ me _ in all the tanks.”

“...You saw yourself in all the tanks?”

“No,” says Ben, “that’s the strange part.”

_ “That’s _ the strange part?”

“When I looked at myself, I saw...I don’t know how to describe it. Human but with a Bith skull, and the skin was shriveled and...very pink.”

“Ha,” he snorts. “You’re right that that’s odd! But what’s so bad about it?”

He stumbles for a moment. “I...I wasn’t at all myself. I couldn’t wake up at first, and when I did I didn’t know where I was.”

Armitage squints at him. “That does sour things.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“My dreams are mainly about plugs stuck in the wrong sockets,” he offers. “Yours are much more interesting.” 

“I don’t know about that,” Ben says with a twitch of the lips. “Sounds like there’s symbolism in yours.”

Armitage rolls his eyes. “If you’d like, ditch meditation. Come by my place instead and regale me with tales of your shriveled-up Bith.”

“I couldn’t—”

“I have tea. Loose-leaf, sourced fresh from a specialty farm.”

He pauses, breathing too hard, watching Ben closely.

A genuine smile breaks across his face. “I might take you up on that.”

“Please do.”

Armitage takes his leave, hastening back towards town, making calculations. The shriveled pink Bith-skulled creature is surely Snoke. The so-called “bacta tanks” must be cloning tanks, growing more Snokes at the Emperor’s command. But Ben had felt like he wasn’t himself, like Snoke was  _ him.  _ He must’ve invaded Snoke’s mind without knowing it.

But Armitage knows. 

It’s a new hope.

.

The bell rings.

“Bad dream again?”

“No, but I could invent one if you’d like.”

Armitage snorts. “No need.”

“I just wanted to...stop by and see the shop.”

“Er…” Armitage glances around the store. “There’s not that much to see. Except that donal capitator.”

Ben spins around to see a charred block of metal. “That’s worse than anything on my family’s ship. I’m impressed.”

“I haven’t given up just yet.”

“Why?”

“My diagnosis is it’s just a particularly heavy case of carbon scoring. If I scrub hard enough, there should be something functional underneath.”

He snorts. “You’re hopeful.”

“Tea?”

“Sure.”

Armitage steps into the back to heat a kettle. He calls, “I also scavenged up what seems to be an old holochess board.”

There’s an odd silence. Then… “The Grimtaash doesn’t work.”

Armitage pours their tea and returns to the room, puzzled.

“The what?”

“The Grimtaash piece,” Ben repeats, bent over a now flickering holochess board. “Everything’s fine except this one; it’s supposed to have higher health.”

“Well, perhaps it’s a legitimate variant—” He breaks off as Ben breaks the chessboard open, diving straight into its innards. “What do you think you’re  _ doing?” _

There comes an ominous snap.

“There.” Ben seals the chessboard’s surface again. “Fixed it.”

He powers it back on, and Armitage’s scowl softens once the holopieces appear, all seemingly intact. He saunters over to the table, placing Ben’s teacup before him.

“You’re quite the master.”

“I haven’t played holochess since being on the  _ Falcon,”  _ Ben murmurs. “That’s my family’s ship.”

Armitage nods as if this is new information, as if he hadn’t repeatedly set his troops on that precise ship.

“So...about ten years back,” Ben finishes.

Armitage raises his own tea to his lips— a gentle green brew that’s nothing like the harsh tarine he was raised on— and perches on the worktable beside Ben. “You’d better teach me, then.”

.

The bell rings at odd hours, whenever Ben can slip away from the Academy. Sipping his tea, he hangs around while Armitage works and occasionally assists him, levitating heavy machinery and reshaping misformed parts with the Force. Armitage thanks him every time but otherwise takes it in stride. It’s a careful balance, showing his appreciation without treating Ben as unnatural.

Once the shop’s clear, they sit down for holochess. It’s a game of wits, and Armitage learns the rules quickly, even winning one against his Master Ben.

“Really, it’s my win because I taught you,” gloats Ben, and Armitage laughs freely.

.

Layering multiple types of encryption, Armitage alerts Senator Organa to an upcoming ambush on the Otomak system. According to galactic news, she orchestrates a subtle military intervention and cuts the First Order off from Haysian smelt, the key conductor for their future computer systems.

It’s just another game of wits.

.

The bell rings late one night, startling Armitage from his bed. He grabs the blaster from his nightstand and the dagger from under his mattress.

“Who is it?” 

“Lizer?”

Recognizing Ben’s voice— familiar, though a little loud— he throws the weapons back on the mattress and enters the shop. “It’s eleven at night.” He just barely keeps from saying “twenty-three,” military-style. “Is something wrong?”

He flips on the lights and finds Ben slouched against the door, face flushed red.

“...are you drunk?”

“No,” Ben answers, whole body swaying. “No, I am most certainly not drunk, just…”

“Heavily intoxicated due to alcohol consumption.”

“Exactly.”

“Take a seat. I’d challenge you to holochess, but even I’m concerned it’d be unfair.”

“We were playing sabacc,” he replies. “All the older kids. You got a drink every time you won.”

“Then I suppose I should congratulate you on multiple victories.” Armitage fetches a tin of crackers from his pantry and then sits down beside him. “Eat something; you’ll regret your winnings less tomorrow.”

With a mouth full of crumbs, he mumbles, “Now they’re playing Spin the Bottle.”

“I don’t know that one.”

“You sit in a circle, and take turns.”

“Sounds traditional.”

“And we put the first bottle down when we finished it, and when it’s your turn you have to spin the bottle.”

“So it’s accurately named,” Armitage says.

“And you have to kiss whoever it lands on.”

Armitage chokes on a cracker.

“And since we’re all Jedi wannabes, everyone cheats. You manipulate the bottle to point wherever you want.”

“...and why aren’t you playing?”

Ben swallows, his gaze sweet and intense and entirely focused on Armitage. “I looked around, and none of them were the ones I wanted to kiss.”

Armitage would ask who Ben wanted to kiss, but he doesn’t believe in voicing stupid questions. And it is a stupid question, the way Ben’s looking at him now.

He’d kissed Ren on accident the first time, on some visceral animal instinct, without thought or warning. They had to kiss, or they’d kill each other instead. It’s nothing like how Ben advances, deliberative and tentative and wide-eyed, signaling his intentions from miles away. Yet Armitage is paralyzed by his own surprise.

The moment before impact, he lifts his hand to Ben’s chin, turning his head softly but firmly aside, and lays a kiss on his cheek instead.

They linger there, Armitage’s breath warm on his cheek and his fingers on his chin, until Ben gives a slow exhale.

“Come back in the morning and we’ll talk,” Armitage breathes. “Please.”

.

He doesn’t sleep that night, instead rehearsing his speech a hundred times over. But Ben doesn’t come all morning. 

When he does arrive it’s nearly sunset. The shop’s been empty for an hour.

“I’m sorry,” Ben announces immediately. “I was too forward last night. Blame the alcohol, but also...blame me for making assumptions and seeing things that weren’t there.”

He blurts all this before Armitage can speak.

“You weren’t seeing things,” he replies slowly. 

“No, I should’ve known you wouldn’t—”

“Don’t you dare think,” he cuts in, “that you’re not good enough for me. Not for an instant.”

Ben blinks at him. He’s got undereye shadows like Ren had, near the end.

“There are…” Armitage pauses, trying to piece together the speech he’d planned. “There are reasons I can only have you as a friend, and none of them imply any deficiency in you. Anyone who says otherwise is lying,” he adds with too much heat.

Inhaling deeply, Ben squares his shoulders and prepares for incoming.

“I’m too old for you,” Armitage commences.

“You can’t be more than five years older—”

“I  _ feel _ older, then.” Every word’s bolstered by the fact that it’s the truth. “I’ve given you a false impression of who I am. You’ve done me a great honor by not asking why I’m really hiding on Vitta, or what my name really is, if not ‘Solo,’ but I have to tell you this. I am tired and burnt-out and...not a good man.”

“Sounds like the sort of thing a good man would say.”

“I believe,” he declares, ignoring that comment, “that the galaxy has a soulmate for you. Someone kind and, and righteous, and...you will have your great romance. You’re young. You’ll forget me. Your real love story will be beautiful enough to shake the stars.”

“But—”

“And I’m in love with another man.”

That silences him.

“He’s why I’m here, now,” Armitage says, with a choked-off, delirious snort. “We hurt each other in imaginative ways, and I got the worst of it. You could say I’m running from him, and the worst of what he represents. But Ben...I see the best of him in you.” He smiles at Ben through inconvenient tears. “It’s unspeakably complicated, but what’s relevant right now is that I am damaged in ways you will never understand. There’s a whole  _ war _ in my head that no one else will know.”

“But I feel the same—”

“Ben, you can do better than someone like...like who  _ I _ have been. You  _ will _ do better.”

The statement hangs in the air, until Ben at last nods. “I didn’t know. And I won’t pressure you again, ever, I promise.”

“...It’s not your fault.”

“I know, just. Is this other guy still alive?”

Armitage resists the urge to laugh hysterically. “Honestly? I don’t know yet.”

“If he is, and he ever dares threaten you again? I’ll end him.”

(Armitage is counting on it.)

.

Every word Armitage said was true, so he can’t regret turning Ben away. It won’t do to give Ben false hope, not when Armitage knows where their destiny leads. If they’re lucky, if Armitage can save him, Ben Solo will live happily with Rey, his Force-appointed soulmate. If they’re lucky, Armitage will soon be dead and at something approaching peace, his life given freely for Ben Solo’s sake. It’s the most optimistic fate he can wish for.

He thanks the stars when Ben creeps in a few days later, weary from a day of training, and plops down wordlessly for a holochess game.

.

“Can you help me with something?”

Armitage’s bent over a holomap projected on his table. He meant to only look at Jakku for old time’s sake, but a nearby glitch caught his eye— an odd patch in the Outer Rim, where matter’s collecting around a seemingly blank space. Hearing Ben, he switches the whole display off.

“Anything.”

Ben stands empty-handed behind him. The pockets of his robes lie smooth, apparently empty too.

He follows Armitage’s eyes down and snorts. “You’d better come with me.”

.

Armitage approaches the Jedi Academy, armed with a toolbox that Ben chivalrously carries for him. Ben punches in a keycode to open a back door, and they rapidly sneak inside the central building.

“I don’t want to be personally dressed down by Luke Skywalker,” Armitage mutters.

“Don’t worry,” Ben retorts, “he saves all the yelling for me.”

Somehow that’s not comforting.

“Here.” Ben leads him down empty hallways to a spacious room, walled with mirrors.   
“What is this?”

“One of the combat practice rooms.”

“And what’s broken?”

Ben’s gaze slowly shifts upwards. 

Above them, a metal grate dangles from a single nail. The ceiling’s been rent in two, metal panels crumpled like paper and revealing crushed pipes.

“I don’t know what happened,” Ben whispers. “I haven’t meditated enough, I know, I’m out of balance.”

“I see.”

“There’s something  _ wrong _ with me,” he finishes, desperate.

“Perhaps,” Armitage counters sharply. “But whatever or  _ whoever _ drove you to this point surely deserves some of the blame.”

He strides over to the toolbox and flicks it open, selecting the sensors he’ll need to investigate.

“You don’t  _ have _ to fix it.”

“I know,” Armitage says calmly, meeting his stare, “and yet here I am.”

He gets to work quickly, assessing the damage. It looks worse than it is; between his expertise and Ben’s Force skills he can leave the ceiling strictly better than it was before.

“Can you stay a few hours to help?” Armitage asks.

“Of course.”

Ben leaves briefly and returns with his homework, and they settle in for the night. At first Armitage stands on a stool and tinkers in silence, pausing regularly to rest his arms. They ache from the exertion of stretching overhead—

“Should I stop the pain? With the Force?”

Armitage gawps down in genuine surprise. “You can do that?”

“It’s not painkilling, technically, I just...heal some of the damage.”

“That’s strictly better. Is healing a usual skill for a Jedi?”

“No,” he shrugs. “Seems to just be me, for some reason.”

“Huh.” 

Armitage crouches by Ben, who sets aside his book and clasps one bicep between his hands, and relief flows through his sinews. Ben heals the other arm too, palms warm and gentle. 

It puzzles Armitage. Ren was never capable of anything of the sort. He has a guess at why.

“...Is this healing magic the exclusive domain of the light side of the Force?”

“You need a strong connection to the light side, yes,” Ben confirms. “Mending the human body requires incredible clarity and understanding, which you can’t have without the light.”

“I see.”

“But you can’t do it without the dark either.”

Armitage’s eyes flick up to Ben’s face. “I thought it was all extremes, with the Force. All light and goodness, or all dark and evil.”

He sighs, hands slipping down to Armitage’s forearms. “That is what the books say.”

“But it’s not true?”

He shrugs. “You can’t heal without balance. The light lets you fix an injury, but the dark helps you find and acknowledge the hurt in the first place. You need both.”

“Fascinating.”

“And it’s  _ hard,  _ healing. You need the dark side’s reckless passion—” Ben’s hands creep down to Armitage’s hands, minor scrapes and burns disappearing at his touch— “and the light side’s…”

When he goes silent, Armitage prods. “The light side’s what?”

“The technical term is ‘unconditional love.’”

Ben pulls his hands away.

Armitage rises without comment and returns to his work. He doesn’t comment on how Ben looks up too often from his homework to absorb anything, just stealing glances at him in the mirror. 

It’s common practice to install an alert system after repairing an old building like this, something to warn mechanics if their changes don’t work out. And though he’s confident that his repairs are impeccable, he still hides the signaling system in the ceiling. It’ll double as a fire alarm.

.

“I wanted to ask your advice on something.”

Armitage drops a mag-coil. It clangs onto his worktable, and he spins around. “How can I help?”

Ben strides forward with a scroll. He unrolls it, revealing the design for a blue lightsaber. “Master Luke’s declared me ready for my own saber.”

“You have my congratulations.” 

“Congratulations would be right five years back. By this point, it’s just embarrassing.”

“You have my  _ aggressive _ congratulations.”

Ben shakes his head, chuckling. “Lightsabers run on these things called kyber crystals. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them?”

Starkiller’s ray ran entirely on kyber.

“I’ve heard of them, yes,” he answers mildly.

“Well, I have mine picked out. I don’t know what to do next.”

“What’s the trouble?” Armitage shrugs. “Isn’t it just like any other battery?”

“Other batteries don’t petrify everyone on the planet when they backfire,” he deadpans.

Armitage widens his eyes as if shocked. In truth, he knows this tale— the story of the Sith who got frozen by their own kyber superweapon, long ago on the lost planet Malachor. Armitage studied it obsessively in a prior life, alongside more modern mishaps from the Death Stars’ construction. It was a point of pride that his Starkiller never misbehaved.

(The incident with the oscillator  _ doesn’t count.) _

“There’s a vulnerability in my crystal,” Ben continues. “It’s fragile, I can feel it.”

“Then why not pick another one?”

“I...can’t. Stupid, I know, but I’m already attached.”

Armitage can understand foolish attachments.

“So is there any way to pre-emptively reduce stress on it, so it doesn’t explode or…”

“Crack?”

“Right.”

“You might double the modulation circuits,” Armitage suggests, pointing at the design. “Hide the extra wiring inside the hilt.”

“Obviously, who’d leave wires exposed?”

Ren left wires exposed.

“And get a top-notch matrix,” Armitage adds.

Ben nods thoughtfully.

“And you could add…”

“What?”

“I don’t know, maybe some sort of vent to let off pressure?”

Ben’s eyes light up like stars. “If I had two, it could be a crossguard saber! Look, it’s an old Jedi design, right out of a history book—”

He whips out a pen and starts adding to the sketch, outlining a crossguard saber all in blue. Armitage can’t breathe.

.

He sends another untraceable message to Senator Organa, warning her to keep a closer eye on Ilum, with its deep kyber reserves. If she intervenes now, the Order won’t get the batteries for its top turbolasers. It’ll also shut down a more ambitious project.

Starkiller will never rise.

.

It’s nine years before the Starkiller incident. 25 ABY. 

Even on Vitta, Armitage absorbs multiple news sources. Each day, he drinks a cup of tea and reads the top articles religiously.

“Pandemonium on the Senate floor! Senator Organa is revealed as the daughter of Darth Vader, according to Centrist Senators…”

The timeline’s shifted. Organa didn’t fall from grace until 28 ABY, last time, but the politicians have moved faster, grabbing at legitimate power within the existing Senate. It’s a sign that the Order’s gotten desperate. That Armitage has blocked their extralegal military efforts. 

Armitage waits for Ben.

He waits.

Days pass. With panic Armitage realizes that he might’ve left Vitta entirely, weathering the storm with his family in some off-planet Organa-Solo palace, until he spies Ben exiting from one of the other town repair shops. The centrifuge is once again tucked under his arm.

“Ben?”

He freezes. Armitage hurries towards him.

“Should I be offended that you’ve taken up with other mechanics?”

Ben straightens up and turns back towards him warily, unbrushed curls tumbling over red-rimmed eyes.

“I was sparing you the trouble,” he mumbles, “of having to kick me out.”

“What for?”

He receives no answer.

It’s a rustic town where people ordinarily mind their own business. Still, a crowd forms, glares focused squarely on Ben. Placing his hand on Ben’s elbow, Armitage shepherds him through the throng. Though Ben tucks his head low like he’s trying to disappear, Armitage stares them all down.

.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

“I have to,” Ben insists, breathless and choking on tears. The centrifuge lies half-crushed on Armitage’s worktable. “You don’t know yet. Obviously.”

“Know what?”

“My grandfather on my mother’s side is…” Ben inhales deeply, steeling himself for the revelation.

“Darth Vader? I read about it on the HoloNet News.”

Ben goggles at him.

“And perhaps it was unethical for you to keep that secret from me,” Armitage adds casually, pouring out two cups of tea. “But as I haven’t said much about my family either, I quite forgive you.”

“I…” He gazes bleary-eyed up at Armitage. “I didn’t keep anything from you.”

He pauses. “Excuse me?”

“I didn’t know.”

That stuns Armitage to stillness— to a still and silent fury. He’d always assumed that Ben grew up knowing the origin of his bloodline, because how could his family conspire to hide that from him? It’s the sort of treachery one expects from Brendol Hux, not the shining heroes of the Rebellion.

“They’ve always been scared of me,” Ben continues, voice shaking. “I’ve always reminded them of him, I saw Vader in their heads and they always told me I was imagining things.”

This retroactively explains too much of Ren’s misery. Armitage places a teacup before Ben with a soft clink, endeavoring to hide how his own hands quake with rage.

“And they were right,” Ben gasps, “they were completely right. I’m heir to a monster. There’s no way around that. I am doomed by the Force and there is no fighting it—“

“I don’t believe that.”

“I break everything I touch!” He shoots to his feet. “I’m dooming you too, you can’t be seen with me, be…connected to me after all this—“

“Ben Solo,” Armitage commands, bringing the full force of a general’s authority to bear, “sit down and drink your tea.”

He obeys. Armitage takes a sip of his own drink, stalling to plot out his words.

“If you’re expecting me to banish you from my life just because you’re Vader’s grandson, you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

“But—“

“Isn’t there a clause in the New Republic constitution,” he adds with a slight sneer, “banning discrimination on the basis of one’s ancestors’ crimes?”

“…in a court of law, yes.”

“You aren’t doomed by the Force,” Armitage states. “That’d be ridiculous. If you don’t want to be the next Vader, then just don’t be the next Vader. No red sabers, no melodramatic black cloaks, no declaring yourself ‘Galactic Lord of Darkness.’ Promise?”

The image wrings a teary chuckle out of Ben. “Promise.”

“And if I might offer some more advice…” He waits for Ben to nod. “You have four grandparents. Six if you count the Organas. I’ll bet none of the others were murderous tyrants, so you might look into them and see who else you’re heir to.”

He exhales gloomily. “My dad’s dad was a shipbuilder.”

“How constructive.”

“I can’t just. Just ask my mother for a full family tree. She sent me this little note after I found out I was Vader’s grandson off galactic HNN, with a solid seven excuses for never telling me. And there was an apology, but she’s not sorry she lied. Just that she got caught. I tried to draft some kind of answer, but I got so mad I...”

He gestures at the wrecked centrifuge.

“Understood,” Armitage replies matter-of-factly. “Try your father instead.”

“…I could do that.”

“And there’s all manner of news articles coming out on both the Skywalkers and Organas. Skip the hit pieces, but you might find something helpful.”

He slides his own news transceiver over. As Ben gingerly powers it on, Armitage repairs the poor centrifuge once more.

.

Armitage reads about Ben’s other grandparents that night. Most articles focus on Anakin Skywalker, bickering over whether he was a good man led astray or evil through and through. Other reporters investigate the Organas and their adoption.

But only Senator Padme Amidala holds Armitage’s attention.

He’s drawn to her from his first glimpse of her painted white face. She seems a kindred spirit. He doesn’t know why.

She was a pacifist, a quality Armitage can hardly claim. She was also a lover of democracy, and there Armitage can sympathize. Despite certain personal bias, he’d noticed how unfit Ren was for autocracy. Crushed by the weight of the throne he’d seized, Supreme Leader Ren made his choices on raw instinct, wreaking havoc on the entire empire under him. The chaos single-handedly turned Armitage into a spy and soured him on dictatorships forevermore.

(He might make an exception if  _ he _ were the dictator.)

Yet it’s not Amidala’s politics that snag his interest, but the caterwauling editorials written about her. Some journalists deem her a ruthless tactician, driven by intellect to the end. Others call her an overwrought, emotional fool, blinded by romance. 

However they struggle, they can’t define her. 

Armitage discovers a detailed account of her death, sewn together from the Organas’ records and hospital med droids. It claims she was strangled nearly to death by her husband in the black fortress of Mustafar, lava spraying all around. It claims she fell to her knees, and he let her go, and she died soon after from no known medical cause, simply giving up her life.

It claims she died insisting there was still good in him.

(And decades later, Armitage crumpled to his own knees as Ren choked him, in the black of Snoke’s smoke-filled throne room with sparks spraying around them. That had marked the official end of their romance, and Armitage had given up his life soon after, so easily. He’d given it all to a blue butterfly, one last tremulous bit of hope.)

The editorials argue over whether she was a brilliant strategist or a love-struck simpleton, as if the two possibilities are exclusive, as if Armitage hasn’t been  _ both.  _ The holoprojection of Padme gazes at him across the years and the stars, and the weight of it all suddenly strikes him.

“There’s good in him,” he murmurs, feeling that she might somehow hear. “I won’t let them crush it, this time.”

.

So this is what Ren meant by a “legacy.”

.

A rapid beeping wakes Armitage up too early, years too early. Something’s triggered the Academy fire alarm.

He scrambles out of bed and grabs his weapons and two masks, fitted with the same smoke filters he once designed for the Order’s stormtroopers, and he jumps into a ramshackle ship he bought one month back and guns the engine, heading straight for the school. The central grey dome glows a brazen red. When he disembarks, he spies a lone figure kneeling before the blaze.

“Ben!”

Ben doesn’t respond. He stares, hypnotized, face contorted by horror.

Gripping the masks, Armitage plants himself by him. “Is anyone else in there?”

He shakes his head no.

“Anything of extreme value?”

“Some...texts?”

“Are there other copies?”

A nod.

“Then get up. Ben,” he repeats, more insistent as students start streaming out of the surrounding buildings with buckets and hoses, “get up right now.”

He drops the masks and tries hauling Ben up, and the contact snaps him out of his daze. He rises and stumbles away, towards another dark figure approaching from behind. The blaze casts his face into sharp relief.

Luke Skywalker.

“Ben,” he barks out.

Ben stumbles towards his uncle, drawn like a moth to light, until Skywalker raises a metal arm and freezes him.

Until he breaks into Ben’s mind.

From Ren, Armitage knows this scene.

A saber flashes green, and Skywalker lunges for Ben. On instinct Armitage springs forth too, flinging himself in his path and snatching up his own blaster. He shoots.

Then he flinches because of course Skywalker deflects the blast, of course it shoots right back at Armitage’s unarmored chest, and as he closes his eyes and surrenders completely he hears the light whispering  _ give your life to save Ben Solo— _

The bolt never strikes.

He opens his eyes again. It wavers in midair. In his periphery, Ben’s hand is outstretched, holding back the blast.

Then Ben throws his other arm roughly across Armitage’s chest and jerks him aside, and the blast speeds past them both into the flames. They stay that way, pressed back-to-chest, breathing too hard.

Luke breaks the silence, powering off his saber. “I’m sorry.”

Armitage lowers his blaster.

“You should be,” replies Ben, loud and even.

“There was a darkness. It must have clouded my mind, I couldn’t see you.”

“Just Vader?” he challenges.

“I’m  _ sorry.” _ Luke gestures at the fire. “What happened here?”

“I’m…not sorry,” comes Ben’s answer, and Armitage could swoon from relief. “I was in the library, reading, and I felt a darkness, same as you. Once I smelled smoke, I ran. I had  _ nothing _ to do with this.”

Armitage hears confidence that Ren never had. Below it, unwavering honesty.

“Who are you?”

Luke looks straight at him. Without moving, he answers, “Lizer.”

“Where are you from?”

“Town.”

“Before that?”

“Jakku.”

The answer slips off his tongue, and it’s not even a lie. He went to Jakku as a child. Part of him never left.

“Why are you here, Lizer from Jakku?” As Luke takes a step forward, Ben’s arm tightens, unmistakably protective.

“I did maintenance on the building. It’s standard protocol for mechanics to continue monitoring irregularities, and a fire qualifies—”

“No, why are  _ you _ here?”

He straightens up, acutely aware of Ben’s embrace. “Because someone has to care.”

The words hang over the fire’s crackling.

“I can’t stay here.” Ben speaks, resolute yet rueful. “You tried to kill me, I can’t...”

He steps back and lets go of Armitage.

“I agree,” Armitage interjects, because he knows how this scene went last time. Last time, Ben jumped in his ship, the  _ Grimtaash,  _ and flew straight into Snoke’s waiting arms. He turns around and lowers his voice. “Come with me.”

After a moment, Ben nods.

.

They leave the school in silence, unchallenged.

Once Armitage settles back into the pilot’s seat of his ship, Ben strapped in safely beside him, he lets out a long breath.

“I can’t believe he tried to kill me,” Ben intones.

“Is there any chance,” Armitage ventures, “that he was temporarily possessed? That somehow the forces of darkness took him over, and that wasn’t really him?”

Ben doesn’t answer.

“Well,” he continues, “I’m not the Force expert by any means. All I can say is that sensing magical darkness the second before the building catches fire sounds terrifying.”

“I’ve felt the darkness all my life,” Ben answers rapidly.

Armitage steals a glance at him, his eyes frozen forward by shock, his whole frame shaking. He reaches sideways and places his hand on Ben’s. 

Without looking, he folds Armitage’s hand in his own.

“Is it like the dreams?”

“What?”

“You told me you had strange dreams,” Armitage comments. “There was one about being locked in a dirty green bacta tank, it was quite memorable.”

“Oh. Yeah, it is like that.”

Armitage waits.

“I’ve had other dreams since then, but I don’t know if I should tell you.”

“For what it’s worth, I am in no position to judge anyone for anything.” When Ben glances at him, he elaborates, “You understand I just shot at _ Luke Skywalker?” _

“You were very cool about it too.”

“I try.”

They fall into silence, zipping over the rolling hills.

“Here’s one that’s funny,” Ben says eventually. “I’d just read this novel a couple weeks back, about a medic who tries to heal monsters. Call it wish fulfillment, with the whole Vader story. And when I went to sleep, I dreamt I was dressed beautifully, entirely in gold, but my hands were huge and wrinkled up, with claws and this ugly black ring I’d never wear in a million years.”

Armitage keeps his hands loose on the wheel. He keeps his breathing steady.

Even though Ben’s just perfectly described Snoke.

“And it must’ve been because I’d read about monsters for a whole week, but I was surrounded by things that were...undead.”

“Undead?”

“There was one that was half-machine.”

“Like Vader?”

“More machine than that.”

“Huh.”

“Looked sort of like old Palpatine, actually.”

“...and the others?”

“It was the oddest thing. I could feel all these people in the Force, all strong in the dark side, but when I looked they were just...rocks.”

“I’m trying to come up with a deep psychological analysis,” Armitage remarks, “and here’s what I have.”

“What?”

“You should stop reading scary novels.”

Miraculously, Ben laughs. He’s still chuckling when they land, when Armitage leads Ben into the shop and then back to his private rooms.

“This,” Ben declares, “is not how I imagined coming back here.”

He looks around hungrily, though there isn’t much to see. There’s a bed and a table without chairs. In the corner’s a tiny kitchen. The cabinets are stocked with basic equipment and his remaining bread powder. Though he’s strewn a few interesting parts and tools on the table, Ben won’t guess what they’re for.

“Wash up,” Armitage says, jerking his head towards the refresher. He can smell the smoke on Ben, and so he briskly fetches a change of clothes and presses it into his hands. Ben obeys. A few minutes later, he emerges showered and changed to find Armitage lying on a blanket on the floor.

“I’ll take that.”

Armitage scowls. “You’ve had a hard enough day without adding back problems to the list.”

“I insist.”

He looks up at the hard set of Ben’s jaw and surrenders. A few minutes later, he’s lying in his own bed in darkness, holding onto the sound of Ben breathing a few feet away.

“Should I turn the light on in the shop?” he mutters. “So it’s not entirely dark?”

“...It doesn’t feel dark when you’re here.”

Armitage huffs out a laugh and waits.

“Can I tell you about another dream?”

“Yes.”

“Have you read anything about my grandmother, Padme Amidala?”

“I’ve read rather a lot about her, actually.”

“I dreamed it was us on Mustafar.” His voice breaks as he adds, “You and I.”

After a moment, Armitage fills in what he hasn’t said. “I see.”

In another life Armitage would’ve gloated at reducing him to tears, at making him sick at such violence.

“It’s just a dream,” he says.

“It seemed more real than anything else—”

Armitage breaks in: “Was there lava in the background?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be pleased to know Mustafar’s not volcanic anymore; it’s been remade with forests. So whatever you saw, it won’t literally happen. Not in our future.” 

“But what if—”

“Then I forgive you.”

He’s ascended to a new level of exhaustion, an impossible serenity. He nearly martyred himself today.

“Whatever your crimes have been or will be— if you take over the galaxy, if you murder me— you have my whole-hearted foregiveness.”

“You’re joking.”

“I am not.”

The blanket rustles as Ben moves to sit up.

“The other man I loved,” Armitage remarks calmly, “choked me. He threw me into a wall, causing lasting brain damage. If anyone managed to bring him to trial, his other crimes would’ve gotten him sentenced to death a few hundred times over. Would you believe I still have faith in him?”

“...Why?”

“Perhaps because my brain is astoundingly miswired,” he muses. “Perhaps because hope’s powerful, even when it’s foolish.”

He nearly martyred himself today. Though he’s still breathing, he can sense his fate closing in. 

“So when I say I can forgive you anything,” he finishes, “it’s not a figure of speech."

He purchased this second chance, all this time on Vitta, with his life. The debt will come due within a month or two.

(Armitage knows where Palpatine is.)

He’s wanted to be left  _ alone _ since he was five years old. He’s been desperate for peace, and soon he’ll have it— unending peace, unbreakable. It’s foolish now more than ever to want anything more.

When the blanket rustles again, Armitage breaks. “Would you like to come up here?”

Ben doesn’t answer, just slips into the waiting space beside him.

There’s no reason for hope. Still, Armitage shifts onto his side and curls up around Ben, burying his face in those curls. It’s the way he once held Ren. Even though he’s dying—  _ because _ he’s dying— he lets himself pretend it’s real.

.

Ben hangs around the shop, complicating the third-to-last step in the master plan. 

Armitage draws this step out. It’s tactically sensible. He might’ve raised alarms that night at the Academy, so if he waits, he’ll lull Snoke and whoever else has piggy-backed onto Ben’s mind back into complacency.

Armitage starts wearing his weapons around the shop. He waits. 

In the mornings, before either of them’s fully awake, he steals kisses. They’re chaste, perfectly deniable, lips pressed against the back of Ben’s neck or his cheeks or his temples. He steals moments with Ben, smiles and witty quips and honest conversation. He savors them like a prisoner at a last meal.

At last, sneaking around Ben, he gets out a message to Leia Organa. It warns her that the First Order has multiple Centrist senators directly under its influence. She likely suspects as much already; news outlets have circulated the rumors. Objectively speaking, it’s not a particularly helpful bit of intelligence, and he packages it with a shoddy attempt at encryption.

Winter comes. He starts wearing a coat with armor underneath.

He waits.

.

It takes two weeks. After two weeks, Ben goes out for a walk, and the bell rings, and Brendol Hux walks into his son’s repair shop.

Armitage doesn’t reach for his blaster. He waits, trembling against his will. 

(One look and he’s turned to stone, turned back into a little frightened child under his father’s gaze.)

Brendol locks the door behind him. Armitage can’t move.

“So it’s true,” he says at last. “I didn’t want to believe it. You turned traitor.”

Armitage can only nod.

“You’ve gone soft,” he snarls, “ the New Republic’s trained lapdog. Between selling secrets to the enemy and falling into a rebel prince’s bed...”

Armitage stays silent.

“Well?” Brendol demands. With one grand sweep of his arm, the worktable’s contents clatter onto the ground. The holochess board crashes loudest.

“I owe you no explanation,” he states at last. “I owe you nothing.”

“You owe me your life. All your training—”

“You trained me to die,” spits Armitage, gaining power. “You trained me to kill, and to die, and to not care about either one.”

Without any further warning, he grabs the blaster and shoots Brendol in the chest. It’s a smooth shot— long-rehearsed. Brendol falls before he can even flinch.

Armitage shoots the head, just to be sure.

He waits.

The door spontaneously unlocks itself a few minutes later, and Ben bursts in, panting. “I felt something, what—”

He looks down.

“Meet my father,” Armitage says through gritted teeth. “Brendol Hux of the First Order.”

“What—”

“While I don’t recommend patricide for you— or in general— I don’t regret  _ this. _ He came to execute me,” he mutters, eyes fixed downwards. “You see, I grew up in the Order, and I passed one of their secrets to your mother.”

_ “What?” _

“Something that might stop the Order before it properly starts.” Armitage strides forward towards Ben. “Because you deserve a better future than war.”

“Lizer, what are you  _ talking about?” _

“My name is Armitage Hux,” he says, coming to a stop just before Ben, not caring whether he’s stepped in the blood. “I rose from the First Order. I was raised to be a general; that was the legacy set out for me. But that does not define me. My father will  _ never _ define me.”

Ben gapes at him, lips parted.

“The New Republic might want me on murder charges. Even if they don’t, the Order will hunt me down. I have to leave.”

“You don’t—”

“I do.”

Lifting his hands to cradle Armitage’s neck and brush his cheeks, Ben ambushes him. “Let me come with you.”

Armitage’s mind goes blank.

“No,” he sputters on recovery. “You can’t. This is not your fault, it’s not your responsibility—.”

“I don’t care. I won’t let you face this alone—”

“Ben, I’ve seen this coming for so long; I’ll—” he nearly says he’ll “live with it,” but he doesn’t intend to lie, not now. “I’ll run.  _ You _ have to stay, and live. Do you hear me?” he demands. “You have to  _ live.” _

“...I hear you.”

“Live, and be happy. And I beg you, do not ‘fall to the dark side’ for  _ my _ sake.”

“If you dare say you wouldn’t be worth it—”

“I’m not worth it,” he says, lifting his own hands to meet Ben’s. “But more importantly, you are so much more than just darkness.”

Gently, he raises his own hands and pulls Ben’s away.

For an instant, something pulls them together, and Ben’s eyelids flutter closed and he leans in to brush their lips together—

Armitage jerks himself away before they kiss. He drags himself away, instead scrambling for the few supplies he hasn’t already stashed in his ship— the last box of bread powder, a grappling hook. His part in Ben’s fate has come to a close; it’s pure selfishness to enmesh himself any further.

“I love you,” Ben blurts out, and Armitage nearly falls to his knees, because those are three words Ren never said and he knows Ben means them. He knows. 

He meant to heal Ben’s heart, not break it.

If he was a better man, driven by a soft beating heart instead of a hyperdrive mind, he’d stop now and swear he feels the same way. He’d stay by Ben, just cling to his Padawan robes and refuse to take another step towards his death. He’d pretend his love was  _ good _ enough to deserve a moment more of Ben’s time.

He marches out and lets the shop door clang shut behind him.

.

Armitage steps out of his ship and onto Jakku.

The moment his boot hits the scorched desert, something comes disconnected in his brain, and Ben Solo seems a world away. As the winds leech his skin dry, Armitage can barely remember Vitta with its endless rolling green. There’s only crashed Imperial ships now, and sand. It’s like he never left.

Restored to his natural state of numbness, he starts the real work.

With military efficiency, he strides to a local market and makes inquiries. He tells the shopkeeper he requires a scavenger, someone small with delicate fingers, someone with years of experience dismantling Imperial tech, who could disappear and not be missed. He bombards the man with questions until he narrows down the choices to one.

“You’ll want the little girl at the AT-AT, that way past the vaporators…”

Armitage marches up to Rey’s door and bangs it twice. Five minutes later, he’s engaged her services. 

Gripping her staff and scowling, she follows him onto his ship. He loads her speeder onto his ship and zooms towards the horizon, straight towards the Plaintive Hand plateau, feeling nothing _. _

When they disembark, Armitage unloads a rolling trunk of equipment. They approach the door of a bunker, half covered in sand and protected by sentry droids.

“Would you kindly put your hand on the scanner?” he asks. The Observatory requires two people to open it.

“You need to hack it,” she retorts. “At least one of us needs to be a legitimate user in the system, or else we’ll be burnt—”

He cuts her off by scanning his own palm.

“Identified,” proclaims a mechanical voice. “Armitage Hux, Leader of the Counselor’s Child Guards.”

“Huh.” Rey presses her own hand to the scan plate.

“Unregistered guest of Armitage Hux,” it announces.

With a soft  _ pop,  _ the black doors open the pressure seal, revealing black and polished metal. The hall before them slopes elegantly downwards, pristine but for the sand tracked in some fifteen years back. With Rey behind him, Armitage steps into the cool darkness and marches back underground.

It comes naturally.

He was there at the Battle of Jakku, and so he knows that part of the Emperor’s grand Contingency failed. The Emperor had buried a superweapon under Jakku, drilling a hole down to the core. The weapon was meant to destroy the entire planet, but it never fired.

Still, Armitage can guess at the design, surely similar to the Death Stars’. There’s kyber buried deep, and where there is kyber Armitage has power. Starkiller ran on kyber. He knows it intimately.

“Here,” he says. They arrive at a dark, narrow pit with rungs leading down. “You have to go down there.”

She glares at him. “You’re not serious.”

“I won’t fit, but you can climb the rungs down.” He pulls a grappling hook from his box. “This’ll keep you from falling.”

“Will you really give me an entire box of bread powder for this?” she says, openly mistrustful.

“I will.”

She studies him. Then she grunts, apparently finding him trustworthy, and clips the hook to her belt. “And what do you want exactly?”

“Find the console on the wall. Activate it, and it’ll show you a structure.”

The console will control a massive kyber battery. As of right now, it must still be configured to only blow up Jakku. His ambitions reach higher.

“There’ll be two shapes inside the structure, marked ‘night’ and ‘day’ lattices. Use the dials to move them so they’re at perfect right angles, in harmony.”

The lattices lie within the kyber, dictating its behavior, and Armitage must reshape them. The Death Stars reversed the lattices of their crystals entirely, forcing night to take the position of day, but Armitage developed a theory on Starkiller: there’s even greater power in balancing the lattices. He never tested that hypothesis— tampering with kyber is an explosive venture, especially at a superweapon’s scale. So he won’t touch the battery. He’ll let Rey try instead.

She’s fated to live, after all.

She pulls it off with unjust ease. Her sullen face lights up when Armitage pays her in bread powder and throws in an extra bag of credits, and he verifies that she’ll immediately stow them in her home, an AT-AT safely on the other side of Jakku. Clutching her treasure, she scrambles back out of the Observatory. Back towards her speeder and the Jakku sun, towards the light and love and life the Force has granted her. 

He remains in the black, buried underground once more.

.

As he waits for her to reach the other hemisphere, he opens his trunk and begins construction, fitting the borehole with tapering mag-coils, aimed carefully askew. It’s a stripped-down version of the Final Order’s planet-killers. His target lies off Jakku. To reach it, he must focus the blast to a deadly point.

He powers up the Observatory’s ancient Sith computers. Untouched by Jedi meddling, their maps confirm his hypothesis— in the Outer Rim, only a few parsecs from Jakku, lies the lost Sith world of Malachor. A shattering clarity whispers that Palpatine survives there, that he’s raising both the First and Final Order from that seat. He’s exploiting the knowledge of all the old Sith who still linger there. Those Sith Lords are the statues Ben spoke of, set in stone by their own ancient machinations.

In the ghostly peace, Armitage makes his calculations.

He waits for Jakku to spin, for night to fall, for Malachor to come within view. He makes his calculations and aims the mag-coils, so the blast will rip straight through the Observatory’s ceiling into the sky. It’ll tear through space and make Palpatine burn.

The sun sets.

It will work, the light whispers. His time has come. Armitage has waited so long for this peace and quiet, for his magnificent sacrifice. He waits for the elation of his glorious death to sweep him up.

He gets only melancholy.

(He glimpses a blue glimmer, but it’s only the computer’s blinking lights.)

Night falls. The kyber crystal needs a kick-start. On Starkiller he sucked up a sun to provide that initial burst of power, but here he opens the vents at the very bottom of the borehole, exposing the magma in Jakku’s core. A faint red glows from the pit. The magma licks upwards, and once Armitage checks the temperature, he locks in the final calculations. The crystal lets out a menacing crackle. 

The light whispers he will succeed in destroying Malachor, but his own intellect tells him that the weapon will crumple right afterwards. It was made crudely, with outdated tech, without a single safety mechanism. The light whispers that Rey has made her escape, and he’s glad for it, for the weapon will backfire as soon as it shoots. He can’t predict the malfunction precisely, but he expects this side of Jakku to follow Malachor into oblivion.

Blue light explodes from the borehole, a burst of hot air scalding Armitage’s face, and the whole Observatory rumbles. There is no surviving this. Armitage sold his life to a blue butterfly, to a desperate hope. 

He’s hoped for death since the last time he stood in this haunted spot.

Yet at the last second, some long-abandoned instinct flares within him. Though he knows he’s doomed, though he knows it’s hopeless, he begins to run back out of the Observatory, stumbling as the smoke billows and the ground quakes. He runs, clinging to life until the exit collapses before him, until the rubble strikes him and he falls and goes oddly, serenely numb—

Until he gives his life for Ben Solo.

.

“Careful, kid. Hibernation sickness is no joke.”

Armitage awakens to a gruff faraway voice, and soft hands close by, one on his back, one cradling his neck. At first he feels paralyzed, but the numbness fades, freeing him inch by inch. Though he’s in pitch-black darkness, he lifts one quivering hand. It catches on long curls.

He explores further, discovering a human-feeling face. Smooth-shaven cheeks. Absurdly lush lips curled in a smile he’d recognize anytime.

_ “Ben?” _

Armitage awakens the year Starkiller would fire, if he hadn’t burned Palpatine, if the First Order hadn’t crumbled to ash months afterwards. Palpatine and Snoke are both dead. Kylo Ren was never born. 

The galaxy is at peace.

.

Nine years ago, Ben Solo woke up and found himself free of Snoke. He left Vitta soon afterwards, abandoning his Jedi studies and dragging his father into a new mission, a galaxy-wide search—

“For what?”

“You.”

As he speaks, Ben holds his hand and keeps healing him, pouring himself into Armitage.

“You couldn’t have died. I’d have felt it.”

“...what exactly did I do instead?”

He’d turned to rock. His makeshift superweapon backfired just as Malachor’s had a thousand years back, and it had frozen every living creature within a mile in carbonite. Hux lay senseless, petrified, nearly dead for nearly a decade.

(Until Ben.)

“But how did you find me?”

“Rey. I ran into her on Takodana. With your money she got off Jakku ages ago, and now she tends bar for my dad’s copilot’s lover.”

Armitage tries to still his face. He tries.

“She showed me where she’d last seen you,” Ben continues. “We have a Force bond.”

“So you got your soulmate.” He chuckles weakly. “See, I told you.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “I got my soulmate. You’re right here.”

Armitage inhales sharply, willing himself not to weep.

“And I went to Exegol,” Ben adds. “The New Republic investigated every planet the First Order ever touched, and there were a couple ships there to look at. But I snuck off into a canyon, with this red glow inside.”

“What did you see?”

“Starkiller, and Kylo Ren...and General Hux of the First Order.”

“You  _ know?” _

“I know everything.”

“Why are you still here?”

He can’t see, and so he can’t stifle the sob when Ben’s hand suddenly caresses his face, tracing gently along his jaw.

“A wise man—” the humor shines through his voice— “taught me to care less about the past, and more about what someone does in the future.”

“A very wise man.”

“So I must be wise,” Ben breathes, “in choosing him as my...everything.”

As Ben heals him from the carbonite, Armitage’s vision slowly returns, until he can make out the vaguest outline of his face.

(His curls are shoulder-length, and Armitage can’t believe how relieved he feels at the sight.)

Propelled by a surge of strength all his own, he pushes up and kisses Ben. 

.

Ben sweeps him up and carries him from the Observatory, lifting debris from the path with the Force, and as they creep back towards open air, a thousand passions storm through Armitage’s heart. He’ll never know peace again. He won’t  _ want _ peace, not when he can have Ben. 

He flinches as they emerge aboveground, preparing to be blinded by the Jakku sun, but he finds binary moons instead, balancing the night sky with their soft silver light.

(As Han Solo fires up the  _ Millennium Falcon _ for their departure, Armitage realizes the Force never once asked for his death.)

He keeps whispering with Ben in the moonlight, exchanging smiles and quips and promises. Armitage means to stay with him. He means to fight for them both, with all the passion he’s got.

He willingly gives his long, long life to Ben Solo.


End file.
